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Instructional Design & Education in Action

Learning and Teaching Trends for 2012

Posted on by Bruce Richards

With the new year already bringing its share of angst and work for faculty and instructors, it is always helpful to be aware of the various technology and learning trends and predictions that could affect ones’ teaching and delivery of course materials and knowledge.

 

I present five articles (blogs) that speak to the various trends to watch out for based on opinions of persons in the field of instructional design and teaching bring to higher education.

Articles on Trends for 2012:

  1. Learning Trends affecting learning experiences
    • The author discusses content curation, developing learning in the cloud, flipped learning, gamification, and new blended learning.
  2. Top six e-Learning Predictions
    • Predictions on things that could happen in 2012 affecting teaching, learning, technology, business of elearning policy, regulations, student behavior, or other related items.
  3. Five Higher Education Trends for 2012
    • Higher education institutions will look to improve the learning experience through analytics and personalized learning environments, while reducing costs with digital resources and cloud technologies.
  4. Information Technology Trends to watch in 2012
    • Four eminent futurists predict the trend lines for 6 major issues facing IT in higher education in 2012.
  5. 2012: What’s Hot and What’s Not
    • IT in Higher Education

We trust these articles and predictions will give you food for thought as we continuously redefine our teaching and the effect it will have on student learning.

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Evaluating Student Writing with Adobe Acobat Pro

Posted on by Bruce Richards

The use of Adobe Acrobat on the campus has seen an increase over the last 18 months with faculty using it within face-to-face, blended and online clasess for documentation, subject matter writing, and for instruction.

The uses of Adobe Acrobat has ranged from:

  • Documentation
  • Debates and Discussions among students
  • Presentation of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents
  • Presentation of Survey results on research projects among faculty
  • Tutorials on pedagogy using technology in teaching and learning
  • Simulations of technology and soft skill training
  • Course presentations
  • e-Portfolios

The Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning constantly seek to extend the usage of Adobe Acrobat, so as to increase access for our students and support the transfer of learning and education.

In a recent paper from EDUCAUSE, a faculty from a external institution presented how she has found Adobe Connect useful fro evaluation of student writing.

Paper: Evaluating Student Writing with Adobe Acrobat Pro

The key takeaways were:

  • Prompt, specific feedback helps students learn from and revise writing assignments.
  • Students often misunderstand or fail to learn from written comments; they respond more effectively to audio comments.
  • Although it is known that students have a more positive learning experience when their written work is evaluated quickly, this is not always possible for instructors.
  • The audio feedback and other editorial functions available in Adobe Acrobat Pro enable instructors to work quickly while providing the responsive detailed feedback students are more likely to pay attention to and understand.

Take a read and let us have your feedback and thoughts on the paper.

Have a wonderful season!

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Blackboard World 2011

Posted on by Nancy Gordon

On July 12 -14, a group from Missouri State University attended the annual Blackboard World conference held in Las Vegas NV. Our Blackboard administrator, Mike McManus participated in the two day Developer’s Conference prior to the main conference. Attending the conference were myself, Jo Ann Mattson (Instructional Designer/FCTL), Damon Hargraves (Blackboard Trainer/Computer Services), and Gary Rader.

This was the 13th annual Blackboard World conference. Bb World has always been a valuable conference for system administrator or anyone doing Blackboard system work but I was encouraged this year to see Blackboard had dedicated a session track for faculty. I attended many of these sessions and would encourage MSU faculty to participate or present at future conferences.

Conference Highlights:

Meet Me Pronto – Adoption and Deployment Strategies for Pronto
Kara Monroe, Assistant Vice Provost, Center for Instructional Technology, Ivy Tech Community College

ITCC is a Blackboard Collaborate customer. They are using the Pronto Building Block and Pronto is a default setting within all Blackboard courses. Faculty receive training and are certified to teach online. As a result of the training there has been a high adoption rate among faculty using Pronto as part of their online course communication strategy. Faculty use the Office Hour feature, Application Sharing to walk through assignments, Voice Chat, and students use Group Chat for collaboration. ITCC’s Help Desk and Library Services are also using Whiteboard templates and other features to communicate with and support online students.

ITCC has purchased Blackboard Collaborate 11 but first implementation was Pronto tool. They are using ongoing promotion, training, and student orientations to make Pronto part of the learning culture.

Leveraging Academic Analytics in System Administration, Professional Development, and Course Improvement
Garry Brand, Professor, Grand Rapids Community College
Erik Kunnen, Director of Distance Learning and Instructional Technologies, Grand Rapids Community College

GRCC is using Blackboard Stats and Project Astro to monitor Blackboard activity and predict student success. Using these types of programs they are able to drill down and see which faculty are using what tools and monitor for minimum standards such as whether a faculty has posted their syllabus and contact information. The audience questioned this level of system monitoring and the presenters said who is able to mine and use this data and for what purposes is an institutional policy issue. They went on to say they are only interested in seeing what tools faculty are using as a way to identify faculty mentors, showcase sessions, etc.

GRCC uses dashboard views in Project Astro to view specific course and user information such as active courses, active instructors, department usage, top tools used by instructors, top tools used by department, number of student vs. instructor views, activity by course, usage of test pools vs. tests, etc.

It was impressive the amount of detailed data GRCC was able to pull from their Blackboard system using these programs; however, the presenters did not really address how they were using data to access core competencies, course improvement, or professional development. I would deduce that they are not actually using for these purposes even though that was the title of their presentation. Analytics add value to a CMS but it is apparent that institution should make decisions up front as to what data will be pulled, who is responsible for pulling the data, and how it will be used and for what purposes.

Safe Assign + Plagiarism Education Learning Module = Improved Student Writing
Ida Jones, Professor and Assistant to Interim SATO, California State University, Fresno

Fresno State is using Safe Assign which is provided with Blackboard at no cost. MSU faculty have the option to use this and Turnitin which is a subscription paid by the university. Dr. Jones is a professor in the Business College and critical writing is an assessment strategy in upper and lower level business courses. In addition to using Safe Assign the university also provides plagiarism workshops for students, uses ETS Criterion a subscription writing evaluation service, and the Business college uses Pearson’s My Writing and My Reading Lab. They have also created a Blackboard module on plagiarism that faculty can use in their Blackboard courses. Dr. Jones said the Business College had seen a reduction in grammatical, usage and style errors in lower division courses and also a reduction in organizational and development errors in upper level courses. She said through pre and post surveys that faculty and students both agree there has been less plagiarism as a result.

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Digital Professor Academy is open for Enrollment

Posted on by Bruce Richards

The Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning is accepting enrollment in The Digital Professor Academy. This program is open to the MSU instructional community and designed to guide faculty teaching online, blended or face-to-face, to use technology to enhance learning. Participants will learn and practice new strategies through a community of practice model.

You may contact us to learn more about the Digital Professor Academy at InstructionalDesign@missouristate.edu or go to My Learning Connection to register.

To register through My Learning Connection, To log in, go to http://my.missouristate.edu, click the Profile tab, and find the Professional Development channel. Click the My Learning Connection link; this will open My Learning Connection in a new window where you can search for and register for classes (PDF file).

To find all courses under Digital Professor Academy;

  1. Click on Course Catalog (left navigational button)
  2. Click on Show All Classes
  3. Click on the Choose Category drop down box (top of screen) and select  Digital Professor Academy to display all the associated classes
  4. Choose the classes you wish to add to your cart and register

When you look at the details within the registration, you will see dates/times tied to specific learning modules. Please keep in mind these dates will not always mean a face-to-face commitment. The DPA will be offered in a blended format and some of the modules will be entirely online.  Any face to face commitments will be offered several times to allow more faculty participation.

Give us a call or send an email if you need further information. We look forward to providing this developmental opportunity for all faculty who are involved in teaching and learning for face-to-face, online, and blended modalities.

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Highlights from the 8th Annual Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference

Posted on by Nancy Gordon

This past week, I and Jo Ann Mattson from the Faculty Center attended the Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference in Chicago. This conference is certainly growing as a virtual conference; there were 335 attendees in Chicago and 400 virtual attendees. The Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning (FCTL) registered as a virtual attendee so we will soon have links to the archived sessions on our website as soon as they become available.

The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Evidence to Practice: Fulfilling the Promise.’  If you have the opportunity, I would highly recommend attending this conference. It was an amazing gathering of faculty teaching blended learning and several Teaching Learning Centers supporting course redesign efforts at their universities.

The keynote speaker Josh Jarrett from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spoke on what he sees as future trends for blended learning. Two trends that were of particular interest to me as an instructional designer were:

  • Blending data analytics and learning: Higher education tracks various data across their campus – student enrollment and retention, financial aid, institutional financial performance, etc. Now we are seeing more emphasis placed on using assessment data as a predictor for student success, for enhancing the learning environment, and in the redesign of courses. As instructional designers we translate this data into best practices and identify pedagogy to enhance learning.
  • Blending formal and informal learning: Emerging and established technologies provide an effective way of integrating formal and informal learning into our classrooms. Games, social networks, mobile learning and online resources are just a few of the informal learning platforms being used to support the formal learning content in the blended, face-to-face, and online classrooms.

The plenary session was presented by Anthony Picciano from Hunter College, City University of New York; Joel Hartman, Associate Provost and Chief Information Officer at the University of Central Florida; and Tanya Joosten, Director of the Learning Technology Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

These individuals are all respected experts in their fields and each brought a different perspective on the future of blended learning. For me the most noteworthy comment was from Anthony Picciano; “ . . . . blended is not about integrating online and face-2-face, but blending new technologies into the way we teach and learn”.

Blending new technologies into the way we teach and learn.
Blending new technologies into the way we teach and learn.
Blending new technologies into the way we teach and learn.
Blending new technologies into the way we teach and learn.
Blending new technologies into the way we teach and learn.

It’s about LEARNING and Net Gen students learn differently. According to the Net Generation Survey, a study of nearly 8,000 college students at seven colleges and universities:

  • 94% own a cell phone
  • 34 % get their news primarily from websites
  • 76% spend an average of 35 hours a week using instant messaging
  • 75% do schoolwork while instant messaging

Source: The Pew Research Center

I’ve been reading “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr. In his book Carr looks at how the Internet may be the most powerful technology since the printed book in altering our thinking and how we process information. Net Gens use technology to quickly find information, express their feelings about girlfriends or boyfriends on their Facebook page, text their roommate when they are sitting next to each other, and construct meaning and connections about a subject using stimuli from various technologies. Imagine using Second Life to create an engaging simulation where students learn about psychology through avatars that represent real people with real psychological problems. It is a safe environment where risk-taking can be explored with fewer consequences than a real-live scenario.

A session at Sloan-C that stood out for me was an interactive workshop on faculty development. This session was presented by the Learning Technology Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Their philosophy for providing quality blended instruction was to invest upfront in professional development and faculty support. They have a three month program faculty participate in as they begin to develop their online and blended courses. UW-M’s program is similar in nature to the Digital Professor Academy the FCTL is launching this fall.  We will also provide the opportunity to participate in a few pilot workshops this summer.

We attended several workshop sessions which focused on professional development and instructional strategies faculty were successfully incorporating into blended learning. I encourage you to contact the Instructional Designers in the FCTL to learn more about the Sloan-C conference and best practices for blended learning.

InstructionalDesign@MissouriState.edu

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Next Generation Course Redesign Workshop

Posted on by Bruce Richards

Next Generation Course Redesign logo

Written by: Jo Ann Mattson, Instructional Designer

In the recently concluded Next Generation Course Redesign Workshop held on February 24-25, Philip Turner and several faculty members from University of North Texas (UNT) shared their successful program of course redesign. We had a great turnout of faculty to this hands-on workshop that allowed them the opportunity to take one of their current courses and create goal statements, general learning outcomes, and specific learning outcomes. Once the faculty worked through their goals and outcomes, they began to create an instructional unit plan.

It was great to see the excitement among the faculty as they worked together to create a blended strategy for one of the units in their course. They focused on three different formats:

  • Lecture
  • Experiential Learning
  • Online Component

They looked at their general and specific learning outcomes and decided which format would best fit the desired outcomes. Our presenters showed us many great examples of experiential learning and interactive online activities.  Our faculty shared many great ideas that they currently do with their face-to-face courses and began to develop online activities that would engage and enhance student learning.  By the end of the second day, the faculty had a great start on their redesign.

The Instructional Designers from the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning (FCTL) were able to interact with the faculty during the workshop to look at the possibilities of developing experiential learning and interactive online activities that could be useful to enhancing the learning experience for our students.

Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about NGen Course Redesign at Instructionaldesign@missouristate.edu

Additional Reading:
Turner, Philip M., and Ronald S. Carriveau. Next Generation Course Redesign. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Print.

Carriveau. Ronald. Connecting the Dots: Developing Student Learning Outcomes & Outcome Based Assessments. Texas: UNT Printing Services, 2010

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Thoughts from an Instructional Designer

Posted on by Mike Fisher

Written by Nancy Gordon, Instructional Designer
Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning

Fourteen faculty members took time from their busy day on September 21st to attend the pre-recorded seminar, “Teaching More Effectively with Customizing Learning Experiences.” This seminar was presented by Judith Boettcher, a cognitive psychologist and instructional designer who has published much research on designing learning experiences and the future trends of technology in teaching and learning. Dr. Boettcher is someone I have admired greatly since meeting her and Rita-Marie Conrad at a League for Innovation conference several years ago when they presented a workshop designed to assist faculty moving courses to the web. I still have Rita-Marie Conrad’s business card when she was an instructional designer at Florida State University. There, there is my confession – that I collect business cards from published professions in my field just as a baseball fan collects player cards of their favorite homerun hitters! Perhaps someday I’ll share with you my meeting and conversations with Ruth Clark.

Many of the theories and models Dr. Boettcher presented in this seminar can be found in her latest book The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips©2010, Jossey-Bass Publisher and her Designing for Learning website ( http://www.designingforlearning.info/index.html). What the pre-recorded seminar lacked in production quality (the session started abruptly apparently due to technical problems during the live session and Dr. Boettcher had connected from her Florida office so her audio sounded somewhat like a long-distance phone call), was quickly forgotten after the first polling question. The audience was asked their favorite design practice for engaging and customizing learning and the majority of responses were “a well-structured course.”
Dr. Boettcher’s model of a well-structured course is a design that provides a learning experiences framework in which the learner is at the center of the teaching and learning process. Boettcher’s framework simplifies the process of designing and managing instructional experiences by capturing a complex set of interactions among the four elements of an instructional event 1) learner, 2) mentor, 3) knowledge, and 4) environment.

Boettcher’s Learning Experiences Framework
Boettcher's Learning Experiences Framework
Learner (students; who and why)

Mentor (faculty; designs, directs, supports, and assesses)

Environment (infrastructure; where, when, with whom, and how)

Knowledge (content and resources; with what and how accessed)

Boettcher made an important distinction in regard to instructional design that we have all experienced, “we design for the probable learner and customize for the actual learners.” Very wise words indeed.

The majority of the seminar was dedicated to the “Nine Points of Customization” and in Boettcher fashion she left us with a “Checklist for Customizing a Course.”

Checklist for Customizing a Course (Boettcher, 2010)
1. Do you use a getting-acquainted posting that encourages pictures, stories and personal sharing so that you learners and you get to know each other as 3D people as a way of launching your course community and building quick trust?

2. Do you have a discussion thread or forum in the first week requiring learners to review course goals and outcomes and to specify what they want to learn for what purposes so that set explicit personal goals for learning?

3. Do you review course structure, assignments and expectations on deadlines, required meetings, etc with your learners to ensure that the structure will work as well as possible for learners’ needs, expectations and goals?

4. When designing the course and during the course delivery, do you provide for differentiated assignments and readings to customize learning experiences to get a closer fit of assignments to learners’ readiness and interests?

5. Team assignments and peer review are powerful community building and assessment tools’ but they are not necessarily for everyone. Do you allow for some flexibility in how teams work and how peer review works?

6. Leadership opportunities. Have you designed opportunities for some learners to go deeper or to assume some additional learning community responsibilities?

7. Course projects are essential assignments that give students the opportunity to customize their learning. Do you have a project proposal process that cycles between you and the learner for a good learning and interest match?

8. Peer review of project proposals, projects-in-progress and finished projects helps build community, extend learning, and reduce grading burdens and surprises. Have you built peer review into your course somewhere?

9. Projects can have two points of review, one for the finish project and one for sharing the project with others. Have you designed flexibility into the “project sharing” point, letting learners choose between papers, websites, presentations, etc?

I read Boettcher’s latest book, The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips this summer and found the book as well as the information presented in her seminar to be relevant and practical. Just like the title. . . . Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips this seminar provided theory-based techniques for customizing learning experiences for our students. If you are interested in reading the book or reviewing the pre-recorded seminar, contact the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and reserve a copy.

Nancy Gordon, Instructional Designer
Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning

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